In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Hessam Mohammad Moradi

will defend his dissertation

Scalable Indoor Localization Using Ultra-wideband Radios

Abstract

The recent advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have started a new era in modern building management. Various types of sensing platforms are being deployed to understand the in-depth behavior of the occupants in buildings while maintaining human comfort. Technology that tracks people inside the buildings could become a key enabler for many applications in this space. In general definition, indoor localization means finding exact location of devices inside the buildings in which GPS service is mostly unreliable. Existing indoor localization and tracking solutions can be divided into two main categories: passive and active solutions. Passive asset tracking systems are scalable, but their accuracy is limited to few meters (Room Level). On the other side, in active tracking scenarios, the target is carrying a track-able device which makes the location estimation more accurate and robust. In this thesis, we improve scalability and robustness of indoor tracking solutions. Ultra-wideband (UWB)-based indoor localization techniques are one of the well-known and popular active indoor tracking systems. Large bandwidth of UWB signals makes them resilient to multipath fading problem and brings them ability to estimate the location of target with few centimeters error. Despite the recent advancement on accuracy of UWB based indoor tracking systems, the scalability of these systems did not receive enough attention from research community until last few years. In this thesis, we focus on 4 basic challenges in scalability of UWB systems: adaptively finding optimum UWB physical layer setting to achieve best ranging performance while maintaining application requirements, reducing deployment constraints by proposing single anchor UWB indoor localization, studying and mitigating the impact of multi-user interference on UWB ranging, and combining ranging traffic with non-ranging traffic to increase applicability of UWB networks for non-ranging applications.

Date: Monday, March 25, 2019
Time: 11:00 AM
Place: PGH 550
Advisors: Dr. Omprakash Gnawali

Faculty, students, and the general public are invited.